Category Archives: Starred Articles

In my opinion this has been, from the return of Steve Jobs at
least, the singular goal of Apple. Not to make all the moneys, not
to dominate markets, not to impress bloggers but simply to make
products that enhance our lives.

Apple spent nine months in complete silence — from the release of the iPad Mini through last week. The only thing they announced in that interim was the ouster of Scott Forstall and corresponding reshuffling of executive responsibility. No new products, no new designs. And the business and tech media lost their shit over this, declaring an end to Apple’s ability to innovate. Apple’s “This Is Our Signature” mantra is in defiance of this superficial demand for an endless stream of new new new. Apple is saying they’re above the churn of the news cycle, and if you don’t understand that yet, they don’t care. You’ll either get it through your head eventually, or you will never understand Apple.

A new Kickstarter project gives you the tools and technology you need to control a real, living cockroach. According to the RoboRoach campaign, which is currently sitting at $4,300 of its $10,000 goal, touts itself as “world’s first commercially available cyborg”. The kit itself requires a pledge of at least $100 – cockroaches not included.

From the company videos, they show how to perform cockroach “surgery” and install the system onto roaches. Once you’ve gotten through that, you can use their app to move the cockroach left and right. It doesn’t always work perfectly – in fact, some species of roaches just stop in their tracks when you press the button – but this technology definitely has a futuristic feel to it.

Put on your tin foil hats, as it seems dogs and cats will be next… then primates… then humans!

If Dmitry Itskov has his way, the human lifespan will soon no longer depend on the limitations of the human body. Itskov, a Russian tycoon and former media mogul, is the founder of the 2045 Project — a venture that seeks to replace flesh-and-blood bodies with robotic avatars, each one uploaded with the contents of a human brain. The goal: to extend human lives by hundreds or thousands of years, if not indefinitely.

Itskov’s wild ambitions have already attracted the attention of scientists at Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, among other institutions, but he sees the venture as much more than a scientific one. Itskov’s overarching idea is to create something of a global utopia, one in which people, freed from the shackles of their…

Sketchnote Text, Italic and Bold were built from hundreds of
hand-drawn glyphs, and variations on glyphs. These added
characters allowed Delve to create Contextual Alternates —
multiple variations on each character which help recreate
variations in handwriting and can be accessed with tools that
support this OpenType feature, like InDesign.

Adobe has always been a software company, but last month it revealed it was tinkering with something new: hardware. Its first efforts are Project Mighty, a smart stylus with Creative Cloud integration, and Project Napoleon, a smart ruler that can create a variety of different shapes. The company is calling the tools “experiments” — not products — but it’s clear that Adobe has put a lot of thought into them both. We’ve just gotten a chance to play around with their early prototypes to get a better sense of how they work.

A tragic accident has stripped Oculus VR of one of its founding members, Andrew Scott Reisse, who died on Thursday after being struck by a car involved in a police chase. As ABC Los Angeles reports, Reisse was killed in a crosswalk by suspects who were fleeing the scene of a crime.

Reisse was one of the founding members of the Oculus VR team, and worked on the virtual reality headset’s integration with the Unreal engine — including the Oculus Citadel demonstration. He left his mark on several companies, include Scaleform, Gaikai, and eventually Oculus, where he served as a lead engineer.